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Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…researchers share the unsurprising finding that “young adults engage in a number of religious practices less often than do older Americans.” What they may mean to say is traditional religious practices: weekly attendance at religious services, weekly scripture reading, daily prayer, and weekly meditation. (My guess is as good as yours on the greater expected frequency of prayer in the survey.) The Pew survey design is problematic—and this is wher…

New Poll Reveals Jews May Be Open to Change in Israel Policy

By Benjamin Weiner

…o a complex series of failures on both sides). The 69% of respondents (the number is even higher among Jews under 30) opposed to Avigdor Lieberman, the ultra-nationalist politician who has advocated the “transfer” of Israeli Arabs and will most likely be taking up a minister’s portfolio in the new Netanyahu government, further emphasizes the survey’s dovish tilt. But an important question to ask is: what does it mean that so many American Jews sup…

Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…exuality is illegal in Uganda and publishable by up to 14 years in jail. A number of laws have attempted to punish homosexuality with more severe consequences including death, but those bills have folded under international pressure. While activists say the foundation of the bill is fundamentally discriminatory, they also say that successful lobbying campaigns have helped introduce possible amendments that strip the bill of its restrictive backbon…

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…ated on Friday, 27 July, with police firing repeatedly into a crowd of thousands of workers at the viaduct near Halsted and 16th Streets. That Sunday, Protestant sanctuaries across the city rang with endorsements of law enforcement’s violent suppression of “the mob.” At one Methodist church the minister declared, “One of the worst features of the riot is, it did not cost enough human lives…Something like twenty fell under that first volley; it wer…

Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…ed minors and some covered it up. What’s so mysterious about that? A large number of minors have been sexually abused by a large number of clerics. Period. Full stop. It’s simply the beginning of a hideous story that includes the abuse of seminarians, nuns and other women, children of priests, and more, all of whom merit summits of their own. Francis’ discussion of power fell flat. He claimed that the sexual abuse of minors is an abuse of power. H…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…ist Soviet government, including the execution of hundreds of bishops, thousands of monks, and tens of thousands of priests (never a moment of failure, indeed). But throughout Fighting God, Silverman never seems particularly concerned with letting facts get in the way of a good narrative or pithy one-liner. Nowhere is this sloppiness clearer, ironically enough, than when Silverman discusses atheism. Just as Silverman relies on a caricature of reli…

Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

By Diane Winston

…are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per fam…

Unprecedented Anti-LGBTQ Statement By Orthodox Church in America Should Be Christian Nationalist Warning Sign to US Orthodoxy

By Katherine Kelaidis

…tes they had lost. These conversions have been a major catalyst in the transformation of the political face of American Orthodox Christianity and bring at least some of the Orthodox into the fray of the culture wars. Not all American Orthodox jurisdictions are created equal with respect to their involvement in the culture wars, however, and two jurisdictions in particular have been notably active in their efforts: the Antiochian Orthodox Christian…

What’s in a Name? Religious Nones and the American Religious Landscape

By Richard Flory

…publicly proclaim their disbelief. These reactions to the increase in the number of people classified as “religious Nones” represent an assumption based on a market approach of religion and an understanding of religion as a binary reality. Just like any other business, success in the religious marketplace is the goal, and it is measured by the number of people who identify with your particular brand of religion (or irreligion as the case may be)….

Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

By Peter Laarman

…ars, we’ve doubled the number of private school choice programs to 50, the number of private school choice states to 25, plus Washington, D.C., and doubled the number of students currently benefiting from private school choice to 400,000. All told, together, we’ve helped more than a million kids in private school choice programs, and we’re just getting started. “Just getting started”: we should not underestimate how seriously this should be taken….